It’s here, semester eight (insert cliche here). The final countdown, the last chapter of a book convoluted with intersecting plot lines, characters, and people. Four months until the faces that grace my day-to-day are not so familiar. One of my favorite, or not so favorite, things about Stevens is the concept of a “campus character.” Stevens has over 4,000 undergraduate students, and yet gossip spreads as quickly as in high school. I like to think that around 1,000 Stevens students are actually “relevant,” meaning that they are involved in a campus club or sport in some way. The other 3,000 students, well, they are probably locked in their off-campus apartments or dorm rooms on Discord playing video games or commuting home to Morristown, NJ every weekend.
This phenomenon results in the 1,000 “relevant” students having an incredibly high amount of visibility. I always like to say to prospective students that at Stevens, if you want to be involved, you will be able to do so due to the number of organizations and various leadership positions associated with each of them. The negative drawback, or positive perk depending on how you look at it, is the concept of “campus characters.” The term “campus character” refers to an individual who has a character trait or persona that makes them “known” to the more general public. Most likely, you have never spoken to your “campus character.” You may not even know their name or anything about them outside of one specific defining trait or action.
Some of my favorite campus characters include “cowboy yo-yo man” and “sunglasses guy.” Cowboy yo-yo guy spent a lot of my freshman year strolling around campus wearing tall boots that resembled cowboy boots, although I am unsure if they actually were, as they had a unique design. He roamed Pierce dining hall while yo-yoing his yo-yo up and down, as carefree as a 7th grader who just left their school assembly where a man comes and does some yo-yo tricks and then sells you a $20 yo-yo. Unfortunately, I came back to campus junior year to learn that yo yo guy lost the cowboy boots and stopped yo-yoing; it was a true tragedy. “Sunglasses guy” just wears his sunglasses everywhere; inside or outside, summer or winter, he always has these sunglasses on. Rumor has it that if he takes off his sunglasses and looks at your eyes directly, you will be hypnotized and also start wearing sunglasses in non-weather-appropriate settings.
The concept of a “campus character” and all of the nuances that come with it will be one of the many things I will miss about Stevens. There is a certain joy in bringing up one of your campus characters to a friend, and learning that they, too, in fact, know who you are talking about and have also internally given them a descriptive nickname. One day, we will all be 40, and after a long, grueling day at a corporate job, we will wonder, “Hey, whatever happened to cowboy yo-yo man.”
